New terms for a new time: Vocabulary teaching and how society shapes the English lexicon

Abstract

This paper is aimed at focusing on the issue of the creation of new words to provide new concepts with a linguistic shape in genres such as mass media. More often than not, English vocabulary, since this is a lingua franca, will be the starting point for the naming of gadgets in the case of new technologies, for example. For that reason, many concepts such as “Internet”, “software”, “wi-fi”, etc. are not translated into other languages (e.g. Spanish). However, nowadays other languages also provide certain social phenomena with a word which is later being translated and incorporated into English. Such is the case, for instance, of the Spanish noun “austericidio”. The English counterpart is “austericide” and it can be briefly defined as “economic self-destruction”. According to Google, “austericidio” was used 102,000 times on the Internet in 2014, whereas the number of hits retrieved for “austericide” is 60,100 (now the figures have been reduced to 42,000 and 2,140, respectively). Due to the impact of the current crisis on many countries, governments have adopted new measures whose implementation is provoking new situations which require new vocabulary. For that reason, new words are being coined as a reply to this context. A good English example illustrating this phenomenon could be the noun “staycation”, which, in fact, has not been included in some dictionaries yet. It is now also possible to check that a given word is being used with a specific meaning which did not use to be the most frequent one. Such is the case of the Spanish verb “desahuciar”. Many examples (mainly from both English and Spanish) will be provided and classified into different groups. Some of these instances illustrate word formation processes such as blending and borrowings, and they all should be taken into account for vocabulary teaching.